Immigration and Labour: Australia and
Canada Compared
Franca lacovetta, Michael Quinlan, and Ian Radforth
AUSTRALIA AND CANADA — both countries built on successive waves of immigrants — offer a useful point of comparison for exploring critical themes regarding
the complex interplay among immigration, male and female immigrant workers,
and the labour movements of receiving societies. Despite the huge distances
separating the two countries, there are plenty of similarities. As nations with vast
territories, impressive naturalresources,and small populations, national development in each country has been critically affected by successive migration streams.
Immigration has profoundly affected the workforces and labour movements of each
nation. Historically, both countries have had similar economies.1 They have
inherited British political and legal institutions, although the French fact in Canada,
particularly Québec, has made for some important differences. They share, too, a
history of paradox — receiving societies with strong anti-immigration traditions,
especially regarding non-Anglo-Celtic immigrants. In both countries, the labour
movement historically has been a major contributor to such traditions, although,
once again, in both contexts, therecentpast has witnessed a shift from long-standing exclusionary policiesregarding"foreign" workers towards a policy of greater
incorporation. In neither case, however, has this shift obliterated the persistence of
ethnic/gender segmentation in labour markets, especiallyregardingjob ghettos of
immigrant women. In the post-World War n era, both Canada (1962) and Australia
(1973) largely dismantled their racist immigration policies, and since the 1970s,
each has adopted multiculturalism as official policy.2
See, Kealey and Patmorc, "Introduction," in this volume.
Freda Hawkins, Critical Years in Immigration: Canada andAustralia Compared(Mont
1989).
Franca lacovetta, Michael Quinlan, and Ian Radforth, "Immigration and Labour Australia
and Canada Compared," labour/he Travail, 38 (Fall l996)/Labour History, 71 (November
1996), 90-115.
lACOVETTA, QUINLAN and RADFORTH 91
There are also differences of degree and kind. Substantial migration to Canada
dates further back than immigration to Australia. Particularly in the 1660s and
1670s, the colonizing French state sent to Canada demobilized soldiers, indentured
male labourers, and single women sponsored by the crown. Prior to the British
conquest in 1760, about 9,000 European migrants settled in die St Lawrence
Valley, and migration from France was never again significant. Increases in the
French-Canadian population have been due almost entirely to natural growth.3
After 1815, migration to Canada and Australia was for more than a century
dominated by immigrants from die British Isles. Not until die 1980s did British
nationals cease to be die numerically largest group among immigrant arrivals.
British immigrants have also affected trade union developments and labour politics
in both countries: their presence has been felt in die 19tii-century craft unions, die
rise of pro-worker parties, and post-1945 union campaigns. Some important
distinctions emerge, however. British immigrants overwhelmingly dominated Australia's immigrant intake until die post-1945 era, when a mass migration of
non-Anglophone workers occurred. A shift away from an overwhelming dependence on British immigrants occurred 50 years earlier in Canada, during the first 3
decades of die 20th century, when significant numbers of non-British immigrants,
especially Americans (who included ethnic Americans) and continental Europeans,
began to arrive.
Canada's proximity to the United States has also produced some significant
differences vu à vis Australia. The US has been both an important source of
immigrants for Canada and a magnet drawing successive waves of French- and
English-Canadian emigrants to its borders. During die two decades before 1900,
for example, more people left Canada than came (1,600,000 emigrants went to the
US; 1,225,000 arrived in Canada from overseas). The emigrants included Québec
farm families on marginal lands who developed extensive migration chains to the
New England textile mills, where there were jobs for women and children. This
trend was reversed by the early 1900s, but concerns about out-migration to die US,
including the "brain drain" of well-educated and professional Canadians, has been
a continuing theme. Canada's proximity to die US and traditions of cross-border
migration have also profoundly influenced Canada's labour movement. Until
recently, most unions in Canada have been international unions with headquarters
and the bulk of their membership in die United States. Rivalry between international and national unions is also a part of this history. The Canadian situation is
3
R. Cole Harris, éd., Historical Atlas ofCanada, vol I: From the Beginning to 1800 (Toronto
1987); Peter Moogk, "Reluctant Exiles: Emigrants from France in Canada before 1760," in
Gerald Tulchinsky, Immigration in Canada: Historical Perspectives (Toronto 1994), 8-47.
*R. Louis Gentilcore, éd., Historical Atlas of Canada, vol 2: The Land Transformed,
1800-1891 (Toronto 1993), plate 31 ; Bruno Ramirez, On the Move: French-Canadian and
Italian Migrants in the North Atlantic Economy, 1860-1914 (Toronto 1991).
See Bray and Rouillard, in this collection.
92 IMMIGRATION and LABOUR
made still more complex byregionalfragmentationwithin the country, including
the Catholic-nationalist model of unionism that developed in Québec.
Finally, Australia's industrial relations system emerged much sooner than
Canada's, has been far more extensive, and affected a greater percentage of
workers. This pattern, in turn, is linked to the historic success of the union
movement's political offspring, the Australian Labor Party (ALP).
Nineteenth-Century Patterns
Anglo-Celtic immigrants — primarily men — played an important role in the
founding during the first half of the 19th century of trade unionism in Australia and
Canada. Beginning in the mid-1820s, immigrants from the British Isles established
the first Australian trade unions, modelled on those of their homeland. Male
immigrants who had experience with British trade unions helped set up similar
institutions in Canada during the decades following 1815. In the Canadian case,
however, Canadian-bom workers, including French Canadians and descendants of
Anglo-Celtic immigrants, also built these early unions, drawing not only on British
models, but also on experience with, and knowledge of, unions in the United States.
In an era when the Canada-US border was no barrier to tramping artisans, they
carried union cards from American locals into Canada, expanding thereachof the
emerging movement as they travelled. By the 1860s, Canada found itself with two
types of international unions — branches of two British-based unions (the Amalgamated Society of Engineers and the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and
Joiners) and locals of several US-based international craft unions (most notably the
moulders, printers, carpenters, cigar makers, coopers, and organizations of workers
associated with the railway shop crafts and running trades).
Throughout the 19th century, successive waves of Anglo-Celtic immigrants
were for the most part absorbed unproblematically into the labour movements of
both Australia and Canada. English-Canadian craft unionists, for instance, had a
cultural affinity with countless newly arrived skilled immigrants from England and
Scotland, although, to say the least, Irish Catholic newcomers were not everywhere
made to feel welcome.
The Irish played a prominent role in the making of the Canadian working class.
Considerable recentresearch,to be sure, has stressed the diversity of background
and experience among Irish immigrants and their descendants, as well as the large
numbers of Irish Catholic immigrants who succeeded in establishing their own
farms and gaining at least a measure of independence.7 In the public discourse of
6
Craig Heron, The Canadian Labour Movement: A Short History (Toronto 1989); Bryan
Palmer, Working-Class Experience: Rethinking the History ofCanadian Labour, 1800(Toronto 1992); Eugene Forsey, Trade Unions in Canada, 1812-1902 (Toronto 1981).
Donald Harmon Akenson, The Irish in Ontario: A Study in Rural History (Montréal 1984
A. Gordon Darroch and Michael Omstein, "Ethnicity and Class, Transitions Over a Decade:
Ontario, 1861-1871," Canadian Historical Association Historical Papers (1984), 114-37;
Bruce S. Elliott, Irish Migrants in the Canadas: A New Approach (Montréal 1988).
IACOVETTA, QUINLAN and RADFORTH 93
the mid- 19th century, however, Irish immigrants, and especially Irish Catholics,
were associated with urban poverty, crime, and violence. Scholarly research has
shown that the Catholic Irish tended to be over-represented among the urban poor,
die women finding a niche mainly in domestic service and the men in labouring
jobs such as carting, dock work, and heavy construction. Because of widespread
anti-Catholic nativism in many Canadian centres, the Irish Catholics also tended
to be over-represented in jail registers and as combatants in riots. Orange-Green
differences fuelled many of theseriots,as Irish Catholics fought to assert their rights
and establish a place in urban communities where the Orange Order predominated.
Irish Catholic men gained the greatest notoriety for their collective violence when
massed as navvies on large-scale construction projects, particularly during die great
canal-building era of the 1840s in central Canada. Driven by wretched working
conditions, acute economic hardship, and unscrupulous contractors, the Irish
navvies drew on their cultural resources—secret societies and fierce, if temporary,
ethnic cohesion—to mount the biggest strikes of die decade. This rowdy industrial
proletariat was sharply repressed by die state, which created mounted police forces
for the purpose. The ethnic identities of the Irish could cut born ways, at times
fuelling bitter internecine battles among workers, while at othertimesforging class
solidarities and a broadly based labour movement.8
If anything Irish and Anglo-Irish immigrants made an even more critical
contribution to the formation of the Australian working class. The Irish constituted
a significant proportion of transported convicts and also made up a large proportion
of assisted free immigrants from die 1830s onwards.9 Unlike the Canadian case,
those Irish reaching die Australian colonies had no ready access to another
immigration destination like the US. Bom Irish convicts and free immigrants played
a prominent role in industrial struggle and political dissent from die very earliest
period.10 Further, such was die large size and wide distribution of die Irish
*Michael S. Cross, "The Shiners' Wan Social Violence in the Ottawa Valley in the 18305,"
Canadian Historical Review, 54 ( 1973), 1 -26; Ruth Bleasdale, "Class Conflict on the Canals
of Upper Canada in the 1840s," Labour/Le Travailleur, 7 (1981), 9-40; Peter Way, Common
Labor: Workers and the Digging of the North American Canals, 1780-1860 (Cambridge
1993); Scott W. See, Riots in New Brunswick: Orange Nativism and Social Violence in the
1840s (Toronto 1993); Gregory S. Kealey, "The Orange Order in Toronto: Religious Riot
and the Working Class," in Michael J. Piva, éd., A History of Ontario: Selected Readings
(Mississauga 1988), 71 -94; Michael Cottrell, "St Patrick's Day Parades in Nineteenth-Century Toronto," Histoire sociale/Social History, 25 (1992).
Stephen Nicholas, éd., Convict Workers: Reinterpreting Australia's Past (Cambridge
1988).
'TKJT example, Irish convicts were prominent in the Castle Hill revolt of 1804. Further, one
of die earliest groups of assisted Irish immigrants, 150 mechanics who arrived in Tasmania
in 1833 on the "Strathfieldsay," took part in a combination of building workers in Hobait
This industrial activity drew the attention of die colony's Immigration Committee and
Governor Arthur. The latter sent a despatch to London arguing that while die colony needed
94 IMMIGRATION and LABOUR
contribution to the workforce of the Australian colonies that, despite secular
tensions (and some anti-Catholic discrimination amongst the English/Anglophile
ruling colonial elite), there is little or no evidence of the anti-Irish job exclusion
("No Irish Need Apply") sometimes encountered in Canada. Although the Irish
dominated many unskilled occupations, they could also be found in skilled trades. ' '
Ghettoizing Irish immigrants into a narrow band of jobs was never an option, and
the same applied to the union movement The Irish assumed leadership positions
within many unions in die 19th century, especially those of construction workers,
shearers, and various categories of labourers. This pattern flowed into the ALP.1
However ironic it may seem given the immigrant presence in the early unions,
one of the most frequent activities of 19th-century unionists in both Australia and
Canada was to campaign against further immigration. Especially at times of local
unemployment, the labour movements expressed general hostility to immigration.
In the colonies of Tasmania (or Van Diemen's Land) and New South Wales, the
earliest independent political organizations of workers (1827 and 1833 respectively) were formed by emigrant mechanics to fight immigration, both enforced
(convict transportation) and government-assisted free immigrants. Several decades later, when Canadian national labour centrals were first formed in the 1870s
and 1880s, immigration figured prominently in discussions at annual conventions,
in the political lobbying efforts of the centrals, and in their relations with the labour
movement abroad. Independent political action was not yet fully developed in
Canada at this time, and so, on the immigration question, political activists within
the Canadian labour movement were Liberal or Lib-Lab supporters of the opposition to the Conservative government at Ottawa. It was condemned for promoting
free immigration (and thus increasing competition in an unprotected labour market), while providing tariff protection for manufacturers (which resulted in higher
consumer prices) — or as Lib-Lab critics put it, free trade for labour but protection
immigration of industrious mechanics, more caution was needed in selection to avoid
"political effects." See Michael Quintan, Hope Amidst Hard Times: Working Class Organization in Tasmania, J830-1850 (Sydney 1986), 28-9.
This can be illustrated anecdotally. The great grandfather of the Australian co-author of
this paper arrived in Australia from Ireland as an engineer. After working at this trade for
some time he became a brewery cart driver — with predictable consequences!
Irish contribution manifested itself in developing republican sentiment within the
Australian Labor Party (ALP). On the other hand, the Irish Catholic connection which helped
to build a church/labour movement alliance against conscription in 1916 was also a critical
factor splitting the ALP during the cold war 1950s. Throughout the 20th century and up to
the present many ALP leaders and prime ministers (such as James Scullin, John Curlin, and
Paul Keating) were of Irish descent
1
C. Lever-Tracy and M. Quintan, A Divided Working Class? Ethnic Segmentation and
Industrial Conflict in Australia (London 1988); M. Quinlan and C. Lever-Tracy, "From
labour market exclusion to industrial solidarity: Australian trade union responses to Asian
workers, 1830-1988," Cambridge Journal of Economics, 14(1990) 159-81.
lACOVETTA, QUINLAN and RADFORTH 95
for capital. In these same years, Canadian labour centrals busied themselves
corresponding with their counterparts in the British Isles, warning them to be wary
of Dominion immigration agents who painted too glowing a picture of Canada by
exaggerating wage rates and job prospects and underestimating living costs.
Obviously the Canadians were protecting themselves from potential immigrant
competitors for jobs, but they were also showing concern for union brothers in the
old country who might regret a move to Canada.14
In bom Australia and Canada unionistsrepeatedlyexpressed sharp hostility
toward the importation of contract labour and to the assisted immigration of
paupers. Local unions objected to contract labour because too often contracts
specified lower wage rates than those prevailing locally, with the result that contract
immigrant workers drove down local rates. Opposition to assisted passage for
paupers and for indentured child immigrants at least in part grew out of a sense of
outrage at the hardships and plight of desperate British toilers in labour markets
that were in fact quite separate from those of skilled workers.13 In the Australian
case, prior to the cessation of convict transportation (1840 in New South Wales,
1852 in Tasmania, and 1868 in Western Australia), convict immigration from the
British Isles was also sharply opposed.
Unionists in both countries expressed their ethnocentrism by railing against
continental Europeans, or "foreigners," who were imported on contract. In fact, the
numbers of such immigrants entering both countries in the 19th century were small.
In Canada, foreign-speaking men were sometimes brought in as strikebreakers
from the United States, where continental European immigration had already
reached mass proportions during the closing decades of the 19th century. Partly as
a sop to its supporters in the Canadian labour movement, the newly elected Liberal
government in 1897 passed the Alien Labour Act, which prohibited the importation
of contract labour from the us. (To please employers, the Liberal government never
effectively enforced the Act.)16 In Australia small numbers of indentured continental European immigrants (almost all of them men) included German stonemasons
employed in building Victorian railways and Italian and Maltese migrants introduced into the sugar industry. In both countries the racism and ethnocentric
attitudes of Anglo-Celtic unionists led to attacks on such immigrants, but their
numbers were too small to cause more than sporadic concern. More rarely still,
continental European immigrants sought to organize and close ranks with mainstream unionists. In Sydney, for example, Italian workers established a mutual
"Gregory S. Kcaley, Toronto Workers Respond to Industrial Capitalism, 1867-1892
(Toronto 1980), 228,230-1 ; Forscy, Trade Unions in Canada; Robert H. Babcock, Gompers
in Canada: a study in American Continentalism before the First World War (Toronto 1974),
114-15.
15
Joy Parr, Labouring Children: British Immigrant Apprentices to Canada, 1869-1924
(Toronto 1994).
TPaul Craven, 'An Impartial Umpire': Industrial Relations and the Canadian State,
1900-1911 (Toronto 1980).
96 IMMIGRATION and LABOUR
benefit association that sought close links with both the Sydney and Melbourne
Trades and Labour Councils.
Unionists in Australia and Canada alike reserved their most virulent hostility
for Asian workers. In British Columbia, Chinese men began arriving from California in 1858, along with others in the gold rush. Their numbers increased sharply
during the early 1880s, when contractors for the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR)
imported construction labourers on contract from China to perform the most
dangerous building projects through the Rocky Mountains. Already by the 1870s
Anglo-Celtic unionists in the coal mines of Vancouver Island were clashing with
Chinese workers whom the white unionists first excluded from their ranks and then
treated as scab labour. By the late 1880s organized labour on the west coast,
supported by unionists across North America, were playing a leading part in the
fight to exclude Chinese immigrants from Canada. In 1885, the year construction
of the CPR was completed, the white labour movement of British Columbia proudly
shared credit for the Canadian government's discriminatory $50 head tax on
Chinese entering Canada, the first in an escalating series of anti-Chinese measures
adopted by the dominion and provincial governments. During the first quarter of
the 20th century, Canada adopted a series of public policies and surreptitious
practices that amounted to a White Canada policy. Diverse groups lent support to
the policy, but it was given a decided push forward by the Canadian labour
movement.'8
In Australia, fear of Asians—including Chinese, Indians, and to a lesser extent
Pacific Island immigrants — began earlier. Local worker opposition to Asian
immigrants helped curtail government assistance to such immigrants from as early
as the 1830s. From the mid- 1860s, however, 60,000 Pacific Island male labourers
were cajoled and even kidnapped to work as indentured sugar plantation workers
in Queensland. The labour movement opposed the introduction of "Kanaka" labour
and backed up state measures that restricted employment and enshrined the inferior
employment status of these workers. During the gold rush of the 1850s, 40,000
Chinese men entered the colony of Victoria where they met with extreme and
violent hostility from white miners, and this set a pattern for later union responses.
Unlike Pacific Islanders, the employment of Chinese was not limited by law, and
they spread from mining and pastoral work into market gardening, construction,
trading/hawking, laundering, and furniture making. As in Canada, their numbers
17
M. Quinlan, "Immigrant Workers, Trade Union Organization and Industrial Strategy,"
PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 1982.
18
Anthony Chan, Gold Mountain: The Chinese in the New World (Vancouver 1983); Pete
Ward, White Canada Forever: Popular Attitudes and Public Policy Toward Oriental
British Columbia (Montréal 1978); Kay Anderson, Vancouver's Chinatown: Racial Dis
course in Canada, 1875-1980 (Montréal 1991); Patricia Roy, A White Man's Province:
British Columbia Politicians and Chinese and Japanese Immigrants, 1848-1914 (Van
ver 1989).
IACOVETTA, QUINLAN and RADFORTH 97
were insignificant in most industries, but union responses were based on an
exaggerated fear of the potential for Chinese to flood the labour market and they
drew on prevailing racist hierarchies of supposedly superior and inferior races.19
In the last quarter of the 19th century, the exclusion of immigrants of colour
became a key plank of the Australian labour movement Australian unions and their
political offspring, the ALP, played a significant role in excluding non-European
immigrants under the popular public policy known as "White Australia." The
policy, adopted with pride by the new Commonwealth of Australia in 1901, was
historically contingent upon the push for federation and the depression of the 1890s
which undermined any argument about pressing labour shortages. In addition to
the support from labour, there was a wide consensus in favour of building a free
but exclusively European society that emerged within the urban middle class and
among small farmers.20
Early Twentieth-Century Patterns: 1900-1945
For both Canada and Australia, World War n marks an important dividing line
between two important phases of 20th-century immigration. The first phase of
large-scale immigration began at the turn of the century, continued until World
War I, and resumed in the 1920s. (During the Great Depression and World War n,
immigration reduced to a trickle.) In these years, immigration to Australia came
almost entirely from Britain, whereas immigration to Canada came from Britain,
the US, and Europe. Significant differences also emerged in the labour movements
of the two countries and the institutional protections accorded workers. In both
cases, developments of these years influenced the responses of local trade-union
movements to later arriving immigrants.
The success of the White Australia policy resulted in a highly homogenous
Australian workforce and labour movement dominated by British immigrants and
their offspring. During the early decades of the 20th century, immigration was even
more firmly dominated by Anglo-Celtics than previously, and non-Europeans were
almost entirely excluded. Small numbers of Italians, Greeks, and other Europeans
did arrive, mostly in the 1920s and 1930s and largely in response to the admissions
restrictions introduced in the US in the early 1920s. Some were also escaping
fascism at home. But their numbers were too small to prevent a further homogenization of the Australian population. (For example, the proportion of the Australian
population from non-Anglophone and Asian countries respectively fell from 3.7
per cent and 1.2 per cent in 1901 to only 1.9 per cent and 0.3 per cent in 1947.21)
The labour movement continued to oppose immigration in general, and assisted
and contract migration as well as "foreign" immigrants in particular. Some challenges to the racist orthodoxy of White Australia emerged in the 1920s from
19
Quintan and Lever-Tracy, "From labour market exclusion to industrial solidarity."
Quinlan and Lever-Tracey, "From labour market exclusion to industrial solidarity."
Quinlan and Lever-Tracey, "From labour market exclusion to industrial solidarity," 169.
98 IMMIGRATION and LABOUR
left-wing circles. It provoked bitter battles between progressive internationalist and
conservative nationalist elements within the labour movement, but remained a
minority position. In 1930 the Australian Council of Trade Unions declared its
continuing allegiance to White Australia.22
It was thus in the context of a homogenous labour movement, a geographic
isolation that encouraged local solutions, and the growing political importance of
the ALP, that the early 20th century witnessed critical developments in terms of
labour market regulation and workers' protections. The great maritime, pastoral,
and mining strikes of the 1890s and therisingpower of the ALP were catalysts for
the introduction of compulsory arbitration in the various Australian states. At the
federal level, a deal struck between the ALP and protectionists led to the simultaneous introduction of laws providing for immigration restriction, tariff protection,
and compulsory arbitration. The arbitration system helped to bolster union membership, although this effect has frequently been exaggerated. By 1920 union
density in Australia was amongst the highest in the world and remained comparatively high until the mid-1980s.24
These institutional changes placed important restrictions on employers' ability
to exploit immigrants via indentures/contracts or establish low-wage ghettoes, and
Australia's restrictionist immigration policy made the immigrant issue a less than
salient one. Once Anglo-Celtic immigrants were living in Australia, they were seen
as unproblematic by the unions, as in earlier periods. Trade unions opposed
European immigration, especially southern Europeans. Those who came faced
racist hostility, though the response was limited by their small numbers, restricted
employment in sugar-cane cutting, mining, market gardens, and fruit shops, and
rapid tendency towards self-employment and employment by compatriots. But
overt clashes did break out, for example, between local unionists and Italian, Slav,
and others in the metalliferous mines of Broken Hill and Kalgoorie. In the
Queensland sugar industry local unions reacted bitterly to the recruitment of
indentured/contract Italian sugar cane cutters, whom they saw as an extension of
cheap indentured Pacific island and Asian workers. Unlike Asians, Europeans were
not excluded from union membership. But given their contract labour status, local
worker hostility, and the failure of unions to seek their allegiance, few joined
unions. Some were used as strikebreakers, for example, in the sugar strike of 1911
and at South Johnstone in 1927. Far from passive pawns of management, however,
Italian immigrants did occasionally engage in militant action, as, for example, in
1934-35, when they played a leading role in a rank-and-file revolt against the
Australian Workers' Union and a successful campaign to eliminate Weil's Disease
22
Quinlan and Lever-Tracey, "From labour market exclusion to industrial solidarity," 170.
Michael Quinlan and Margaret Gardner, "Researching Industrial Relations History: The
Developent of a Database on Australian Trade Unions, 1825-1900," Labour History, 66,
(1994) 90-113; also see Bray and Rouillard in this volume.
IACOVETTA, QUINLAN and RADFORTH 99
by firing cane prior to harvesting. In Sydney and Melbourne, Italian anti-fascist
groups forged links with the left wing of the labour movement Still, despite the
links (and the ready acceptance of Chinese refugees into unions during World War
n), the number of non-Anglophone immigrants within was too small to bring about
any shift in racist attitudes of Australian unions and their political allies until after
the war.25
In Canada, the early 20th century brought mass immigration and marked the
start of the ethnic diversification of the population and workforce. Some 2.5 million
immigrants entered Canada between 1900 and 1914; of these, close to 1 million
were from Britain, more than 750,000 from the US, and more than 500,000 were
continental Europeans.26 Immigration to western Canada was a major feature of
these years and helped make the prairies one of the most ethnically diverse and
economically dynamic regions of the country. The majority of these immigrants
were English-speaking, but considerable numbers of Germans, Scandinavians, and
eastern Europeans also settled. The latter included ethnic Ukrainians, Hungarians,
Poles, and ethno-religious sects like the Doukbobors and Mennonites, from the
Russian and Austria-Hungarian empires. Mostly midwestern farmers, the Americans included "ethnic Americans," that is, US-bom descendants of earlier European
immigrants, including Scandinavians and Germans. Official restrictions on Asian
admissions and the deceitful, stalling techniques of immigration bureaucrats loathe
to admit African-American farmers kept these and other racial minorities to a
minimum.27
The timing and ethnic character of this migration was due to global factors
well beyond Canadian influence — for example, spreading industrial capitalism
and persistent unfavourable land tenure systems pushing out Europe's rural artisans
and peasants, the closing of the American frontier, and favourable world wheat
prices. But also important was die Canadian government's efforts to attract peasant
families from central and eastern Europe. Ethnic tolerance went hand-in-hand with
economic self-interest: these normally "undesirable" ethnic minorities could be put
to good national use by homesteading the west and enlarging the domestic con-
^S. Macintyre and R. Mitchell, eds., The Foundations of Arbitration (Melbourne 1989); M.
Quintan, "Immigrant Workers"; J. Armstrong, "The Sugar Strike, 1911," in DJ. Murphy,
éd.. The Big Strikes (St Lucia 1983); K.H. Kennedy, "The South Johnstone Strike, 1927,"
in The Big Strikes; D. Menghetti, "The Weil's Disease Strike, 1935," in The Big Striker, C.
Lever-Tracy and G. Kitay, "Working owners and employees in Chinese restaurants in
Australia," International Contributions to Labour Studies, 1 (1991), 87-111.
Donald Kerr, éd., Historical Atlas of Canada, vol. Ill: Addressing the Twentieth Century,
1891-1961 (Toronto 1990), plate 17.
^Gerald Friesen, The Canadian Prairies: A History (Toronto 1984); Harold Martin Troper,
Only Farmers Need Apply: Official Canadian Government Encouragement of Immigrants
from the United States, 1896-1911 (Toronto 1972).
100 IMMIGRATION and LABOUR
sumer markets. By the inter-war years, however, efforts were made to reduce the
volume of less desirable immigrants, including southern and eastern Europeans.28
Not all the immigrants went west, however. Many newcomers, including
Italians and eastern Europeans, found jobs in the labour-intensive resource industries like mining and logging, in railway construction and track maintenance, and
in the factories and on public works projects of cities. Eastern-European Jews
provided skilled and semi-skilled labour in the needle trades. Canada's railway
magnates and major industrialists were powerful advocates of immigration. Indeed,
their desire for a cheap and docile labour force and fierce commitment to unionbusting prompted them to ignore legal prohibitions on the importation of "foreign"
contract labour and to recruit low-waged immigrant labour, especially non-English
speaking immigrants, to replenish their workforces and, on occasion, act as
strikebreakers. Particularly among European male workers, sojourning was a
common pattern in these years; tens of thousands of Italian, Slav, and other male
migrants filled seasonal resource and frontier jobs in an effort to augment dwindling
farm and family incomes back home. Labour agents hired by the railways, industrialists, and shipping companies helped orchestrate the movement. For some,
sojourning translated into the permanent settlement of families and theriseof early
ethnic settlements.29 This choice was denied Chinese men, however, many of
whom became de facto "bachelor" workers because of the official prohibitions
imposed of the entry of wives and children. (The head taxes first introduced in 1886
were followed by the highly restrictive Chinese Immigration Act of 1923.) Concentrated largely in British Columbia, Chinese men worked in the resource industries and the service sector of cities and towns. Admission of Japanese and South
Asians, particularly East Indians, was also seriously restricted, but by bureaucratic
means and international diplomacy. A seemingly insatiable demand for domestic
servants meant that throughout the 20th century, even during virtual closed-door
periods like the Great Depression, government and company-sponsored or subsidized migration of immigrant female domestic workers continued. Lone (though
not necessarily unmarried) women from Britain dominated the early 20th-century
streams, as they had in the 19th century. But by the inter-war years, growing
numbers of Europeans, especially Finns, took jobs as immigrant maids in private
homes (rural or urban) or as cleaning staff in offices and public institutions.30
By the time that Canada was accepting a substantial influx of non-Anglo-Celtic
immigrants, the local labour movement had already gone through its critical,
Donald Avery, Reluctant Host: Canada's Response to Immigrant Workers, 1896-1
(Toronto 1995).
Avery, Reluctant Hosr, Nicholas De Maria Harney, éd., From the shores of hardship
Italians in Canada, Essays by Robert F. Harney (Wetland, ON 1993).
^leg Whitaker, Canadian Immigration Policy Since Confederation (Ottawa 1991); M
ilyn Barber, Immigrant Domestic Servants in Canada (Ottawa 1991); Varpu Lindstrom
Defiant Sisters: A Social History of Finnish Immigrant Women in Canada (Toronto 1
lACOVETTA, QUINLAN and RADFORTH 101
formative stages. It was made up largely of exclusive craft unions and dominated
by an Anglo-Celtic leadership and membership deeply resentful of "foreign"
labour. Racial-ethnic cleavages, patterns of sojourning, and racism fragmented the
early 20th-century Canadian labour movement Although ostracized by the labour
movement and in some cases disinterested in protracted union campaigns because
of their sojourner status, non-Anglophone immigrant workers were not necessarily
docile. Their activism took several forms. In steel-making factories, mines, logging
camps, and on railway sites, Italian, Ukrainian, Polish, and other European workers
engaged in extra-union forms of resistance, downing tools or orchestrating other
work slow-downs and stoppages in protest over unpaid wages, brutal foremen, and
other grievances. Though the strikers were men, they often had active support from
wives and kin within the emerging immigrant enclaves. These "flashes of rebellion" were short-lived and usually did not translate into permanent links with the
established labour movement Nor did another type of response to class exploitation
— taking flight or contract jumping.31
From 1905 to 1920, foreign labourers in Canada's resource industries, harvesting, and track-laying, were drawn to the Industrial Workers of the World (iww or
Wobblies), a militant industrial union founded in Chicago which sought to organize
unskilled, itinerant and immigrant workers across the continent The IWW aimed
ultimately at revolution, but also fought for immediate improvements in working
and living conditions, as well as wage gains. The Wobblies' following in Canada
was overwhelmingly male and concentrated in the West where they staged
impressive free speech demonstrations, marches of the unemployed, and organized
a wide range of workers, including loggers, cooks/waiters, railway construction
crews, street excavators, and teamsters. Sensitive to language differences and the
immediate concerns of sojourners, the iww recruited foreign-speaking workers,
organized ethnic locals, and led some major strikes. In spring and summer 1912,
almost 9,000 railway construction navvies employed by the Canadian Northern
and Grand Truck Pacific in British Columbia's interior took part in impressive but
ultimately unsuccessful iww-organized strikes for higher wages and better working
conditions. Ultimately, the impact of the iww was limited and its vision faltered in
the face of severe state repression, which reached a fever pitch during the "red
scare" of the World War I era.32
Avery, Reluctant Hosts; Ian Radforth, Bushworkers and Bosses: Logging in Northern
Ontario, 1900-1980 (Toronto 1987); Craig Heron, Working in Steel: The Early Years in
Canada, 1883-1935 (Toronto 1988); Orest Martynowych, Ukrainians in Canada: The
Formative Years, 1891-1924 (Edmonton 1991).
M
A.R. McCormack, "The Industrial Workers of the World in Western Canada, 1905-1914,"
Canadian Historical Association, Historical Papers (1975), 167-91; Mark Leier, Where the
Fraser River Flows: The Industrial Workers of the World in British Columbia (Vancouver
1990).
102 IMMIGRATION and LABOUR
A minority of immigrants to Canada brought with them left-wing radical
ideologies developed in their homeland. Ukrainians, Jews, and Finns, for example,
provided an important source of radical leadership to disgruntled compatriots
within particular industries and communities, led union campaigns, occasionally
joined forces with Canadian and British immigrant workers in class action, and
helped forge links with the established Canadian labour movement. Displaying a
dual commitment to both class and ethnic loyalties, Finns in northern Ontario's
logging industry, Jews in the needle trades of Montréal, Toronto, and Winnipeg,
and Ukrainian, Italian, and other European workers in western Canadian mining
districts earned a reputation as "dangerous foreigners." This period witnessed real
instances of cross-ethnic solidarity among Canadian, British, and European workers. The ranks of Canada's socialist parties were peopled by a mixture of immigrant
radicals, though the parties tended to be headed by British socialists. The women
of the ethnic left, especially Jews and Finns, contributed to these leftist movements,
most notably by organizing women workers and consumer boycotts. Efforts at
mounting a feminist challenge, however, received at best modest support from
comrades, male and female alike.
During the early 20th century, bonds of solidarity were even temporarily
forged between the Canadian labour movement and Asian workers. The whitedominated Canadian labour movement continued to pursue a strategy of excluding
Asian workers and in BC, where Asians were concentrated, white unions commonly
adopted racist positions — for example, support for campaigns to boycott Chinese
laundries and other businesses, and to replace Asian labour with white labour.
However, during two periods of heightened labour radicalism — the World War I
era and the Depression — Chinese, Japanese, and East Indian workers, usually in
combination with white workers, participated in strikes, mostly in the lumber
industry and fisheries, and some of the Asian workers' issues (equal pay, eliminating the "Oriental" contract labour system) were placed on the labour movement's
agenda. Instances of cross-racial class solidarities were nevertheless exceptions to
the general patterns outlined above.
In sharp contrast to the extensive industrial relations system extant in Australia
by 1920, only a minority of Canada's workers were protected by unions and
Avery, Reluctant Host, Radforth, Bushworkers and Bosses; Martynowych, Ukrainians
Canada; Lindstrom, Defiant Sisters; Ruth A. Frager, Sweatshop Strife: Class, Ethnicity
Gender in the Jewish labour Movement of Toronto. 1900-1939 (Toronto 1992); Carm
Patrias, Patriots and Proletarians: the PoliticivMion of Hungarian Immigrants in Ca
(Kingston 1994); Allen Seager, "Class, Ethnicity and Politics in the Alberta Coal Fields,
1905-1945," in Dirk Hoerder, éd., "Struggle a hard battle": Essays on Working-Clas
Immigrants (Dekalb, IL 1984); Joan Sangster, Dreams ofEquality: Women on the Canad
Left, 1920-1950 (Toronto 1989); Janice Newton, 77K Feminist Challenge to the Canadia
Left, 1900-1918 (Kingston 1995).
Gillian Creese, "Exclusion or solidarity? Vancouver Workers Confront the 'Oriental
Problem,'" BC Studies, 80 (1988), 24-51.
IACOVETTA, QUINLAN and RADFORTH 103
collective agreements during the early decades of the 20th century. During the
1930s and especially the 1940s, a far greater proportion of Canada's workforce
became organized as a result of a major change in the labour movement—the rise
and spread of industrial unionism. As in the us, the success of the Congress of
Industrial Organizations (CIO) was due largely to the militancy of rank-and-file
workers in steel, auto, rubber, and other mass production industries determined to
fight for first contracts. In some industries, notably the electrical goods and pockets
of the automobile production, women members were numerous. The CIO planted
roots during a period when immigration was minimal or non-existent, and so
immigration was not particularly an issue in these campaigns. Still, the organization
of large numbers of factory operatives would have included many foreign-born
workers, though not recent newcomers.35
Post-1945 Patterns
During the 30 years following World War II both Australia and Canada witnessed
prolonged economic growth, industrial expansion, high employment, and mass
migration. Post-war governments supported platforms that linked full employment,
economic growth, and population-building through migration. Immigration to both
countries increasingly came from a wider range of source countries than previously
(including, eventually, so-called non-white countries). But given Australia's more
firmly entrenched pro-British policy, the impact of the post-1945 migration of
non-Anglophone immigrants on the country's population and workforce was more
immediate and dramatic. The labour movements in both countries grappled with
the issue of incorporating rather than excluding immigrants. Once again, the
Australian situation was more dramatic, largely because its more extensive industrial relations system made it easier to incorporate immigrants into trade unions.
Australia became committed to a policy of mass immigration somewhat sooner
than Canada. Population building for economic purposes was initially a development of wartime reconstruction planning conducted by Australia's Labor government, concerned as it was with the vulnerability the war had exposed. It was clear
to immigration planners that reliance on British sources would be inadequate and
that Australia would have to draw from a wider range of source countries than had
hitherto been the case.36 In Canada, the post-war Liberal government crafted a
policy of mass migration in the late 1940s, moving hesitantly both because of
doubts about the country's ability to sustain the war-induced economic expansion
and because of widespread concerns about the greater ethnic diversity that a policy
of mass migration would almost inevitably entail. But once the post-war economic
boom was clearly evident, the Liberal government became increasingly committed
to expanding Canada's population by means of immigration from both traditional
urving Martin Abella, Nationalism, Communism, and Canadian Labour: The CIO, the
Communist Party, and the Canadian Congress of Labour, 1935-1956 (Toronto 1973).
Quinlan and Lever-Tracy, "From labour market exclusion," 172.
104 IMMIGRATION and LABOUR
and new sources. Long-standing policy commitments to mass migration are
evident from immigration statistics; during the 40 years after 1950, average annual
immigration to Australia was about 113,000 and to Canada 139,000.M
The ethnic diversity of the new arrivals to both countries was striking. In the
late 1940s, Baltic and eastern Europeans, many of them Displaced Persons (that is,
refugees from war-torn areas and from Communist regimes), began to alter the
ethnic mix of the two nations. During the 1950s Canadian and Australian recruiters
turned increasingly to southern Europe, and family and village-based chain migration from Italy and Greece continued strong for many years. In the 1960s and 1970s,
Australia's recruiting was extended to Yugoslavia, Spain, and other southern
European countries, and the borders of "Europe" were slowly widened to include
immigrants from Turkey and the Middle East. With the elimination of explicitly
racial criteria from Canada's selection processes in the 1960s, immigrants of colour
were drawn from the Caribbean, India, and Africa. From the late 1970s, many
newcomers from Asia settled in Australia and Canada, further adding to this
diversity. A few Canadian cities, namely Toronto, Vancouver, and Montréal, were
profoundly affected by the changes. The transformation in Australia was even more
marked by the 1980s. In global terms, the relative size and ethnic diversity of
Australia's immigrant population was probably only matched by Israel and Switzerland.39
The Australian labour movement proved much more supportive of post-war
mass immigration than its Canadian counterpart. Critical to the Australian union
movement's accepting mass migration were commitments on the part of successive
federal governments to maintain full employment, to ensure immigrant workers
received award wages and conditions, to provide a system of tripartite regulation
of skill recognition, and to include leading union officials on immigration policy
boards. Having committed itself to an accord on mass immigration, the Australian
union movement could not exclude immigrant workers from its ranks. By contrast,
union officials had little influence on the making of Canadian immigration policy,
and they remained critical of its fundamentals. In occasional appearances before
policy-making bodies, the central labour organizations always cautioned that
immigrant admissions be tied more closely to increased job opportunities in
Canada, that immigrant labour not be permitted to undercut Canadian labour, and
that employers train more Canadians for skilled positions, rather than allocating
Whitaker, Canadian Immigration Policy, Harold Tropcr, "Canada's Immigration Policy
since 1945," International Journal, 48 (1993), 255-81.
William L. Marr, "Post-war Canadian Immigration Patterns," in Steven doberman, éd.,
The Immigration Dilemma (Vancouver 1992), 17.
Anthony H. Richmond and Jerzy Zubrzycki, Immigrants in Canada and Australia, 2 vol
(Toronto 1984); Freda Hawkins, Canada and Immigration: Public Policy and Public
Concern (Kingston 1972); Alan G. Green, Immigration and the Postwar Canadian Econo
(Toronto 1976); Jane Badcts and W.L. Chiu, Canada's Changing Immigrant Population
(Ottawa 1994).
lACOVETTA, QUINLAN and RADFORTH 105
the best jobs to foreign-trained newcomers. The Québec nationalist labour central,
the Confédération des Syndicate Nationaux, tended to express similar reservations
about mass immigration, as well as doubts about whether die immigrants would
assimilate to the Francophone culture of Québec.
Post-war immigrants to both countries entered a wide range of occupations
and industries, but those from southern Europe and those of non-European background became concentrated in semi-skilled and unskilled jobs in manufacturing,
construction, and certain transport and service positions. There emerged a dynamic
and complex pattern of ethnic- and ethnic/gender-based segmentation in labour
markets. By the late 1950s, male non-Anglophone immigrant workers constituted
the bulk of the workforce in Australia's steelworks and in many workplaces
manufacturing motor vehicles, glass, rubber, and metal products.41 Italian and later
Portuguese male immigrants came to dominate sectors of the construction industry
in several large Canadian cities, while Greek men in the same centres found a place
in the restaurant industry and some factories. Immigrant men from die Caribbean
who came to Canada as landed immigrants worked in the service industry and in
product fabricating and processing plants. In both countries, immigrant women got
work in light manufacturing (clothing, textiles, footwear, etc.) and in the service
industry (notably in cleaning and catering).42 In general, these men and women
held the dirtiest, most dangerous, most physically demanding, least-skilled, leastsecure, and least-paid jobs. This happened not as a result of the establishment of
formal, ethnically-based entry barriers, but rather through a complex set of largely
informal processes — the native-born deserting these jobs for die expanding
white-collar/service sector, the use of language skill as a basis for promotion, and
die relegation of the worst high-turnover jobs to successive waves of recently
arrived immigrants who possessed the least knowledge, choice, and bargaining
power.
40
Avery, Reluctant Host, 150, 180, 192; Hawkins, Canada and Immigration, 350. See
"Submission by the Canadian Labour Congress to the Special Joint Committee on Immigration Policy and the 'Green Paper' on Immigration,'' June 1975, on file at the Industrial
Relations Centre Library, University of Toronto; and Confédération des syndicats nationaux,
"Mémoire sur le politique d'immigration au Canada — Comité special mixte du Sénat et de
la Chambre des Communes en vue d'étudier le Libre Blanc sur l'immigration," (n.d. 1966?).
41
J. Collins, Migrant Hands in a Distant Land: Australia's Post-war Immigration (Sydney
1985); Lever-Tracy and Quinlan, Divided Working Class?; I. Campbell, R. Fincher, and M.
Webber, "Labour Market Segments and Segmentation Processes in Australia," paper present
to TAS A Conference, Murdoch University, December 1991 ; C. Alcorso, Non-English Speaking Background Immigrant Women in the Workforce (Wollongong 1991); C. Alcorso and
G. Harrison, Blue Collar and Beyond: the Experiences ofNon-English Speaking Background
Women in the Australian Labour Force (Canberra 1993).
42
Avery. Reluctant Host, ch. 9; Jeffrey Reitz, Liviana Calzavara, Donna Dasko, Ethnic
Inequality and Segmentation in Jobs (Toronto 1981); Richmond and Zubrzycki, Immigrants
in Canada and Australia.
106 IMMIGRATION and LABOUR
Upon arrival in Canada the great majority of immigrants have acquired landed
status which allows for the possibility of permanent settlement, future citizenship
status, and variousrights,but some people have come to Canada on work visas and
theirrightshave been strictly limited. In 1973 the Canadian government began to
admit some immigrant women from the Caribbean on temporary work visas that
tied them to specific jobs in domestic service. The women's ability to insist on
decent working conditions and fair treatment were severely constrained by fears
of deportation, and the domestic servant's usual means of protest — moving to
another job — was formally blocked. Mobilization by the women themselves and
by left women's groups eventually won some modifications to this particular form
of exploitation, although many immigrant women from the Caribbean continue to
be locked in low-wage cleaning jobs because of informalracialbarriers. Beginning
in the 1960s, farmers in Canada have hired on a seasonal basis male workers from
the Caribbean and Mexico, some of whom were illegals tolerated by Immigration
officials, while others entered on short-term work visas. Pay and conditions in this
sector, where stoop labour is prevalent, have been bad enough to put off Canadian
job seekers even in times of high unemployment, but the jobs continue to draw
migrant workers, many of whom return to particular farms year after year.
The integration of immigrant workers into the labour movements of Australia
and Canada has proceeded along contrasting lines. Despite some initial fears on
the part of Australian trade unions, non-Anglophone immigrant workers did not
demonstrate any abnormal level of hostility to unionism. The strength of the
Australian union movement, the pervasive award system, and a recognition by
federal governments in the 1940s and 1950s that anti-union behaviour or exploitation of immigrant workers would threaten the whole immigration programme,
helped to accomplish the ready acceptance of immigrants into union ranks. The
centralization of the award system was advantageous in the sense that the linking
of movements in wages and conditions at national, industry, and occupational
levels restricted the capacity of employers to use immigrants to develop low-wage
pockets. Further, unlike minimum standards legislation used in Canada, awards
were subject to regular review and unions took a directrolein enforcement. Many
industries in which post-war immigrants were concentrated, such as manufacturing
and construction, were by and large, strongholds of unionism. As a result, union
Patricia Daenzer, Regulating Class Privilege: Immigrant Servants in Canada, 19
1990s (Toronto 1993); Makeda Silvera, Silenced: Makeda Silvera talks to working cla
West Indian women about their lives and struggle as domestic workers in Canada (T
1983); Barber, Immigrant Domestic Servants, 24-5; Vic Satchewich, Racism and th
Incorporation of Foreign Labour: Farm Labour Migration to Canada since 1945 (L
1991).
IACOVETTA, QUINLAN and RADFORTH 107
membership density amongst foreign-speaking workers consistently exceeded that
of both the Australian-bom and immigrants from English-speaking backgrounds.44
The largely unproblematic nature of immigrant absorption into the fabric of
Australian unions alsorepresentedtheresultof a positive set of choices on the part
of immigrants themselves. While there is evidence of immigrant workers either
joining or being involved in spontaneous industrial action — sometimes in direct
defiance of union leaders—from the early 1950s, immigrant workers did not show
any real inclination to establish their own unions. The few known efforts such as
the New Citizens Council and Industrial Workers' Union of Australia, were
conspicuous failures. While such bodies drew a strong backlash from unions, they
also failed because they were unable to draw meaningful support from their target
group.43
In Canada, by contrast, countless immigrants — especially foreign-speaking
immigrants and people of colour — have notreadilyfound a place in the labour
movement. To be sure, immigrant experiences have varied greatly across regions
and industries and even within industries. A decentralized labour relation* system
emphasizing plant-level bargaining has been a contributing factor. Upon arrival a
large proportion of foreign-speaking immigrants and people of colour were compelled to take low-paying jobs in non-union sectors, such as in restaurants and many
light manufacturing plants. Unions in Canada generally had little success organizing such workplaces; the failure of some unionization drives fostered an even wider
pattern of neglect Thus, contacts between many immigrant workers and the
Canadian labour movement simply never developed.
Where craft unions had closed-shop provisions in their collective agreements
with Canadian employers, the tendency had been for unionists to guard jealously
the job opportunities for their own people. In the Toronto construction industry,
for example, the trades unions excluded Italian immigrants during the early 1950s,
with the result that the newcomers congregated in the rapidly expanding, but
unorganized,residentialconstruction sector. From that base many southern Europeans eventually gained access to unionized jobs in the building trades, and it is
charged that they in turn excluded recent immigrants of different backgrounds,
especially immigrants of colour.
By contrast, in many workplaces in Canada's mass-production industries and
in the public sector, union security provisions permitted employers to hire at large,
44
Lever-Tracy and Quintan, Divided Working Class?; L. Foster, A. Marshall, and L.S.
Williams, "Discrimination and the Labor Market: Attainments of Immigrants in Australia,"
American Journal of Sociology, 97 (1991), 721-59.
45
Lever-Tracy and Quinlan, Divided Working Class?, 128,137.
Branca Iacovetta, Such Hardworking People: Italian Immigrants in Postwar Toronto
(Montreal 1992), 166-7; Bromley Armstrong, "Remarks," in Harish Jain, Barbara M. Pitts,
Gloria DeSantis, eds., Equality For All: National Conference on Racial Equality in the
Workplace, Retrospect and Prospect (Hamilton 1991), 489-92.
108 IMMIGRATION and LABOUR
but employees were required by law to pay union dues; most workers joined unions
as a matter of course. There is little evidence that immigrant workers objected to
these arrangements, and thus their entry into industrial and public sector unions in
Canada was largely unproblematic.
In post-war Canada, as in Australia, immigrant workers who joined unions
opted to belong to the mainstream unions; seldom have immigrants founded their
own organizations. To be sure, some workers who were shunned by exclusive craft
unionists formed competing unions among their own ranks. In the mid-1950s
Italian immigrants in the Toronto construction trades built their own organizations,
but these unions soon declined or were absorbed into mainstream ones. Nevertheless, they had succeeded in cajoling building-trades unions into broadening their
memberships at least locally. In British Columbia, East Indian farm workers formed
the Canadian Farmworkers' Union in 1979. By drawing on class and cultural
solidarity they launched several strikes and won collective agreements providing
for improved wages and conditions. Their efforts to extend their organization to
Ontario, by organizing seasonal Mexican and Caribbean sojourners, proved a
failure, however.4
Unlike Canadian scholars, Australian researchers have attempted to assess the
extent to which the behaviour of immigrant unionists has corresponded to or
differed from that of other workers. Historical case study analysis indicates that it
was the direct employment experiences of immigrant workers in Australia (including the strategies pursued by employers and unions), not some generalized notion
of pre-migration culture, that largely explains the industrial behaviour of immigrants.48 Thus, in situations where unions and employers favoured centralized
dealings, leaving few avenues for rank-and-file involvement, this was reflected in
immigrant worker behaviour. And where unions pursued decentralized relations,
immigrant workers proved militant like their non-immigrant union brothers and
sisters. In one large glass factory, for instance, Greek immigrants belonging to the
union of production workers (which favoured highly centralized dealings) were
industrially inactive, while those belonging to the more militant craft unions were
fully involved in the activities of these unions. Australian studies relying on a
survey methodology confirm the pattern; with the exception of language classes
on the job, the industrial issues that most concern immigrant workers are identical
to those of interest to their Australian-born counterparts. These and other studies
47
Iacovetta, Such Hardworking People, ch.7; Avery, Reluctant Host, 208.
Quinlan, "Immigrant Workers"; Lever-Tracy and Quinlan, Divided Working Class?;
Quinlan and Lever-Tracy, "Immigrant Workers, Trade Unions and Industrial Struggle: an
Overview of the Australian Experience, 1945-85," Economic and Industrial Democracy, 9
(1988)7-41.
L. Nicolaou, Australian Unions and Immigrant Workers (Sydney 1991); S. Bertone a
G. Griffin, Immigrant Workers and Trade Unions (Canberra 1992); G. Hillali, Non-Eng
Speaking Background Immigrant Women Workers in the Industrial Relations Sys
Queensland, M.Admin thesis, Griffith University, 1993.
IACOVETTA, QUINLAN and RADFORTH 109
haverevealedthat although immigrant workers tended to hold positive attitudes to
unionism in general they were often critical of the particular union to which they
belonged — a responserelatedto the lack of effort that that union had made on
their behalf.50 Such observations make it difficult to argue that culture—or rather,
culture divorced from class experience — has muchrelevanceto industrial behaviour.
Unions in both Canada and Australia have at times shown interest in issues
relating to immigrants within union ranks, and that attention has heightened in
recent years as immigrants themselves have forced the matter. Amid labour's Cold
War during the late 1940s and early 1950s, unionists in both countries engaged in
confrontations over the arrival of Displaced Persons.31 Left-wingers objected to
the flooding of their ranks with refugees whose European experiences had made
mem staunch anti-Communists. Right-wingers rallied to win the support of allies
who would help to marginalize the Communist activists within the labour movements. In Australia unions representing semi-skilled iron, rail, and building workers provided multilingual information to their immigrant membership and a few
appointed immigrant organizers. However, these practices often lapsed, both as a
result of less concern with anti-union sentiment amongst immigrant workers, and
as the Cold War conflict within the Australian labour movement waned.
As the workforces of both countries diversified greatly in the 1970s, issues of
concern to immigrants were increasingly forced onto union agendas. In Australia
immigrant workers were involved in a series of industrial struggles during that
decade. The award system may have delivered basic protections but it did little to
curb the overbearing behaviour of supervisors in many workplaces or the remoteness of some union leaders. In the early 1970s this growing sense of anger combined
with labour shortages arising from a cut to the immigration intake to produce a
general wave of rank-and-file militancy. A 1973 strike at the Ford Broadmeadows
plant in Melbourne, for instance, demonstrated the need for both management and
unions to revise their positions. The outcome of these struggles was significant
change in a number of industries in management practices (such as increased pay,
more rest-breaks, designated relief teams, etc. in the vehicle building industry). The
message was reinforced by a series of immigrant worker conferences and by a
number of foreign-speaking immigrants winning senior office in unions. Many
unions sought to build firmer bridges with their foreign-born membership by
providing multilingual information and services, appointing immigrant organizers,
encouraging immigrants to take on official positions, or establishing special
committees. This was especially the case with those unions that recognized that
50
See Callus, Quinlan, and Rimmer cited in Lever-Tracy and Quinlan, Divided Working
Class?; Alcorso, Nan-English Speaking Background Immigrant Women.
Avery, Reluctant Host, ch. 7; Milda Danys, DP: Lithuanian Immigration to Canada after
the Second World War (Toronto 1986); Reginald Whitaker, Double Standard.
110 IMMIGRATION and LABOUR
their own organizational survival was tied to winning the loyalty of a substantial
immigrant membership.
Similar institutional innovations with regard to the immigrant presence and
particularly racial minorities were evident in unions in Canada, and the pace of
change increased in the 1980s and early 1990s. In Canada's largest cities especially,
people of colour (the overwhelming majority of whom were immigrants) immersed
in anti-racist politics did much to raise awareness of immigrant and racial issues
within the labour movement. The fact that some governments at the national,
provincial, and local levels wanted to be seen to be promoting multiculturalism and
employment equity has helped to provide a context where minority issues can
sometimes be effectively raised (though resolution is another matter). A case study
of a 1987 struggle by public-sector workers in Toronto illustrates the ways in which
minority-group activism could pay off for workers.52 Unionized, full-time nursing
assistants, the majority of whom were Mack and Asian immigrant women, took
action when the government of Metropolitan Toronto attempted to replace full-time
vacant positions with part-time casual help in homes for the aged. Union activists
drew on support from seniors and from immigrant communities, and they presented
the employer initiative as a set-back for employment equity on the grounds that
many black and Asian women would be adversely affected. Metropolitan Toronto
authorities, committed to a policy of equity, were sufficiently embarrassed to back
down with the result that full-time jobs were preserved.
The Ontario Federation of Labour (OFL) provides an example of the ways in
which a Canadian labour organization has dealt with issues relating to immigrants
and race. With much fanfare and a large financial contribution from the provincial
government, the OFL in 1981 hosted a convention and launched a media campaign
under the slogan "Racism Hurts Everyone." Within the OFL in the 1980s there
developed the Ontario Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, which was open to all
non-whites and raised issues relating to discrimination generated not only by
employers at the workplace, but also among workers and unionists themselves. In
1985 the OFL produced a guide for unionists Steps to Resolving Racial Conflict in
the Workplace and it promoted the formation of local humanrightscommittees.
The following year it held another conference, "Building the Participation of
Workers of Colour in Our Unions." Soon a full-time staff position was created to
handle human rights issues, and the OFL Executive Board was increased by two
seats, one of which had to be filled by a person of colour. It was the first affirmative
action seat for people of colour within the Canadian labour movement. Beginning
in 1988 the OFL, assisted financially by the provincial government, developed and
began administering the largest union literacy program in North America. To be
sure the OFL has been highly active in responding to the challenges relating to
immigration and race, but several large unions and several of the other central
52
Ronnie Leah, "Linking the Struggles: Racism, Feminism and the Union Movement,'' in
Jesse Vorst, et al., eds.. Race, Class, Gender: Bonds and Barriers (Toronto 1991 ), 169-20
IACOVETTA, QUINLAN and RADFORTH 111
organizations within the Canadian labour movements have taken similar kinds of
initiatives.53
Institutional safeguards and growing union sensitivity to the language and
other difficulties of immigrant workers have afforded only a limited if nonetheless
essential level of protection. In bom countries many recently arrived immigrants
continued to find jobs such as those in the fast-food industry, domestic service,
outwork in the needle trades, and fruit and vegetable picking, where conditions and
pay have been poor and exploitation pervasive. In Australia, even where awards
applied, as in the case of restaurant workers andfruit-pickers,widespread evasion
was often common in the absence of effective enforcement by unions and government inspectorates. Because so many immigrants to Canada and Australia work at
dangerous jobs, they have suffered enormously from accidents. Of course, notwithstandingfrequentspurious charges, immigrant workers do not have a propensity
to make disproportionate claims on die compensation system—quite the reverse.
The economic downturn and restructuring of the past fifteen or twenty years
have had especially adverse effects on countless immigrants in bom countries.
Manufacturing plant closings resulting from global competition and tariff reductions in the textile and clothing industries have wiped out the jobs of thousands of
immigrant workers. Even those employed within the public sector were located in
construction, maintenance, hospital laundries, catering, and cleaning jobs which
bore the brunt of direct staff cuts, privatization, and contracting out/outsourcing.
Efforts to enhance productivity through technological innovation and changes to
work organization also affected recent immigrants, not only through reduced labour
demand but also by placing increased skill and literacy demands on those workers
who retained their jobs. The Canadian evidence is perfectly clear. The ability of
immigrants to work for some years and thus narrow the wage gap between
themselves and the Canadian-bom has decreased steadily and substantially during
Julie White, Sisters and Solidarity: Women and Unions in Canada (Toronto 1993),
218-24; Brenda Wall and Winnie Ng, "Linking Language and Labour," Our Tunes (February
1988), 23-6.
Oppen, "Structural Discrimination against Foreigners and Work-Related Health
Risks," Economic and Industrial Democracy, 9 (1988), 43-64; C.R. Williams and M.
Quinlan, "Social Science Research and Occupational Health and Safety." Labour and
Industry, 1 (1988), S88-94; M. Quinlan and P. Bohle, Managing Occupational Health and
Safety in Australia: A Multidisciplinary Approach (Melbourne 1991); J. Blackett-Smith and
A. Rubinstein, Unlucky Dip: A Study of Discrimination in the Victoria Workers' Compensation System (Brunswick 198S); C. Alcorso, "Migrants and the workers' compensation
system: the basis of an ideology," Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology, 25
( 1988), 46-65 ; Charles E. Reasons, Lois R. Ross, and Craig Patterson, Assault on the Worker:
Occupational Health and Safety in Canada (Toronto 1981 ).
112 IMMIGRATION and LABOUR
the past two decades. Many foreign-speaking and black immigrant workers are in
danger of becoming a permanent underclass.31
The direction of change on the labour policy scene is generally to the detriment
of many immigrants, too. In Canada the election of conservative-minded governments has led to a weakening of labour regulations and union protections in several
jurisdictions. The '"union-free" example of various southern US states has been an
inspiration to regimes in Alberta and British Columbia, dimming the prospects of
a secure future for many recent immigrants. In Australia, government restructuring
of the awards system and the promotion of enterprise bargaining have had significant implications for immigrant workers from non-English-speaking backgrounds.
Award restructuring was promoted as entailing the development of a more skilled
and flexible workforce. Genuine multiskilling proved to be the exception rather
than the rule. Even where it did occur the need to leam complex and variable tasks
presented difficulties for immigrants with little command of written English and
in many cases a limited education base in their own language. While some unions
and employers addressed the issue in their agreements, positive outcomes have
been patchy at best. Changes to the award system and more recently the introduction of enterprise bargaining, including avenues for individual employment
contracts (in some state systems) and non-union enterprise agreements (at both
state and federal levels), have led to widespread instances of cost-cutting and work
intensification by employers (through changes to work practices, payment systems,
hours of work, and outsourcing/subcontracting).
A. Jamrozik, C. Boland, D. Stewart, Immigrants and Occupational Welfare: Industry
Restructuring and Its Effects on the Occupational Welfare ofImmigrants from Non-English
Speaking Backgrounds (Canberra 1991); Quinlan and Lever-Tracy, "From labour market
exclusion"; Hillali, Non-English Speaking Background; Leo Panitch and Donald Swartz,
The Assault on Trade Union Freedoms: From Wage Controls to Social Contract (Toronto
1993); Michael Baker and Dwayne Benjamin, "The Performance of Immigrants in the
Canadian Labour Market," Journal of Labor Economics, 12 (1994), 369-405; David E.
Bloom, Gilles Grenier, Morley Gunderson, 77»* Changing Labor Market Position of
Canadian Immigrants (Cambridge, MA 1994).
Anna Yeadman with C. Bradley, NESB Migrant Women and Award Restructuring
(Canberra 1992); A. Jomrozik, C. Boland and D. Stewart, Immigrants and Occupational
Welfare: Industry Restructuring and Its Effects on the Occupational Welfare ofImmigrants
from Non English Speaking Backgrounds (Canberra 1991); S. Bestone and G. Griffin,
Immigrant Workers and Trade Unions (Canberra 1992); M. Morrissey, M. Uibden and C.
Mitchell, Immigration and Restructuring in the Illawarra (Canberra 1992); R. Callus and
M. Knox, The Industrial Relations of Immigrant Employment (Canberra 1993); Michael
O'Donnell, "Lean Production: Best Practice for Non English Speaking Migrant Women
Workers," in R. Callus and M. Schumacher, eds., Current Research in Industrial Relations:
Proceedings of the 8th AIRAANZ Conference (Sydney 1994).
L. Bennett, "Bargaining Away the Rights of the Weak: Non Union Agreements in the
Federal Jurisdiction," in Paul Ronfeldt and Ron McCallum, eds.. Enterprise Bargaining,
Trade Unions, and the Law (Sydney 1995).
IACOVETTA, QUINLAN and RADFORTH 113
In the clothing trades — an area dominated by immigrant women workers,
including recent arrivals — the combination of tariff reductions and changes to
labour market regulation have led to a major shift towards outwork and small
operators (and away from large factories). In turn, these changes have been
associated with sweatshop conditions (with payments as low as $.50 a garment or
$2 an hour — less than a quarter of the minimum award rate) and widespread
breaches of industrial and occupational health and safety laws.
Overall the trend toward enterprise bargaining has led to a diminution of
working conditions amongst those workers, including many non-Anglophone
immigrants, with little bargaining power. Particularly vulnerable are recently
arrived and female non-English-speaking immigrants. Whatever faults they may
have had, centralized awards reduced opportunities for ghettoizing immigrant
workers into low wage pockets. It remains to be seen what overall impact Australia's recently elected conservative government will have on these and related
developments, but early signs are not encouraging.
Conclusion
Canada and Australia are societies that have been fundamentally shaped by
European invasion and successive waves of immigration. No persuasive account
of the labour movement in either country can ignore the impact that immigration
has wrought on the composition of the working class and preoccupations of
workers, unions, and the varied political organizations they have sponsored. This
paper has pointed both to complex experiences specific to each country and to the
many similarities they shared. In explaining some key differences we have referred
to institutional differences that parties — including unions themselves — helped
shape and to "accidents" of geography and borders which, while beyond such
shaping, nonetheless affected certain institutional differences. Most notably, it is
clear that the greater isolation in the 19th and early 20th centuries of Australia from
Europe and other centres of development such as the US enabled it to evolve a more
independent set of institutions regulating the labour market Even here, however,
recent changes in, for example, transport technology and communications make
geographical factors less relevant today.
Placing the experience of both countries in a broader context, it is apparent
that immigration has had a paradoxical relationship with the labour movement.
Although immigrants have been a source of union recruits, new ideas, and leaders,
at the same time they on occasion constituted sources of concern, chauvinism, and
division within the union movements and in the wider societies. The experiences
of both Canada and Australia highlight these paradoxes. In both countries immigrants made a critical contribution to the union movement. In the 19th century,
during the crucial formative period of unionism, Anglo-Celtic immigrants made
t e x t i l e , Clothing and Footwear Union of Australia, The Hidden Costs ofFashion: Report
on the National Outwork Information Campaign (Sydney 1995).
114 IMMIGRATION and LABOUR
up a significant proportion of overall membership and occupied many positions of
leadership. These same unions were generally hostile to the risk of levels of
immigration that would depress wages and working conditions in small but
privileged labour markets. They were also hostile to ethnically distinct groups of
immigrants, especially those from outside Europe, such as the Chinese. In both
countries the industrial and emerging political arms of the labour movement sought
to restrict immigration, notably by excluding non-European immigrants. The
Australian labour movement was more successful at achieving labour market
exclusion. Being somewhat better organized industrially and politically, it was able
to use both federation and racism to forge some strategic political alliances. And
the very remoteness of Australia from Europe made government immigration
assistance more critical and selective.
What we want to stress here is that the impulses or goals of the labour
movement viz à viz immigration were similar in both countries, but that a series of
historically contingent factors have, on some occasions, led to rather different
outcomes. This finding serves as a warning to those who would seek to overgeneralize or oversimplify the relationship of immigration to the labour movement,
advancing some overarching thesis of capital serving racism, for instance. The
evolution of the relationship between immigration and labour briefly summarized
below reinforces our point.
Returning to our comparison of the two countries, it was argued that after 1900
immigration restriction, tariff protection, and the introduction of compulsory
arbitration enabled the Australian union movement to cement its position within
the labour market and society in general. These institutional structures essentially
precluded the establishment of widespread low-wage ghettoes amongst those
non-Anglophone immigrants who did arrive. Ethnically diverse immigrants were
simply not an issue until after World War II. For its part, the Canadian union
movement was splintered by regional differences, including the French-English
divide in its settler population, unionrivalryalong craft and industrial lines, as well
as between national and international organizations, and the fragmentation that
flowed from a rather looser federal political structure than that in Australia. It also
had to deal with a more fluid and ethnically diverse immigrant workforce at an
earlier period in the 20th century than its Australian counterpart. Both countries
experienced some inter-ethnic tensions amongst workers, but these appear to have
been rather more divisive in the case of Canada.
Ironically, the institutional safeguards built by the generally chauvinistic
Australian union movement in the first decades of the 20th century provided a
foundation, when combined with government commitments to full employment
and not undercutting wages, for a wave of immigration in the 20 years after 1945.
The result was an ethnic diversification of Australia's workforce almost unparalleled by any other country. To remain strong, the union movement was obliged to
accept immigrants into its ranks. Thus began a slow and contested accommodation
IACOVETTA, QUINLAN and RADFORTH 115
process, but one which ultimately led to the labour movement publicly eschewing
ethnocentrism and to certain unions seeking to provide multilingual supports for
their members. In Canada a similar process of ethnic diversification and union
accommodation occurred with immigrants helping to broaden union agendas and
thereby strengthen the Canadian union movement
Massive economic restructuring since 1975 and the weakening or abolition of
protective elements of labour laws since 1985 — the latter an even more profound
shift for Australia — have had significant adverse effects in both countries on the
working lives of immigrants, especially recent arrivals and women. As yet these
changes have not led to a splintering of organized labour along ethnic lines.
However, unions are having increasing trouble reaching, let alone protecting, some
of those groups in highly marginalized employment — a development posing a
major challenge for unions both now and into the foreseeable future.
Finally, it is worth nothing that the institutional differences referred to above
have helped to shape labour and ethnic historiography in both countries. The very
strength of institutional factors in the Australian context has made the study of the
relationship of immigrants per se with unions seem more appropriate than the study
of individual national or ethnic groups. It might be argued that a key finding of
much of this research—that immigrant workers' industrial attitudes and behaviour
are essentially identical to that of locally bom workers and their behaviour is indeed
largely shaped by direct workplace experiences rather than pre-migration cultures
— is an artefact of this approach. There is an element of truth in this, although it
should be noted that these findings have come about by researchers using a variety
of different research methods and include some quite committed to the importance
of "culture" or "ethnic distinctiveness." In Canada, on the other hand, weaker
institutional impetuses towards uniformity, and the growth of job enclaves dominated by particular ethnic groups, help explain why specific regions or ethnic
groups have been the focus of research attention. Another factor here may be the
respective strength of different academic disciplines (history vs. industrial relations) — itself a reflection of institutional factors. In the future, critical evaluation
of dominant approaches to historical research on immigration in different countries
may prove as instructive as an evaluation of the findings of this research.